Friday, February 3, 2012

Our garden clean-up man unearthed a snake

A male brown snake. It's living between our pool and our side fence. I'd be okay with this if it was a carpet snake or a green snake since that would be good for rodent control.

But I'm less comfortable with a brown snake because it's a venomous snake. I'm glad it was the garden maintenance man with protective footwear on who found him. Chris likes to clean up the garden wearing a pair of old falling apart sports shoes. They wouldn't have offered too much protection against a snake who might be a bit cranky about his home being torn up.

So then I rang a local snake catcher for some advice. He charges an $80 call-out fee with no guarantee he'll be able to catch the snake. Today's probably not the best day for him to come since all the disturbance of the gardening has most likely scared the snake away for the moment. The snake might return, but then again he might not (that would be a far cheaper option as far as I'm concerned so I hope that happens...). So we have the snake catcher's number so we can give him a call if we see it again. He can be here in 15 minutes to have a look for it.

Apparently the suburb we live in is (and I quote) "a real hot spot for snakes." Nice to know that. I think we are going to have to be a bit more vigilant about preventing overgrowth in our garden in the future.

And we are going to have to go and tell our next door neighbours about all this. Some of the overgrown trees were pushing the fence over into their yard (lower down than ours) so we needed to clean them up to stop the fence from falling over. We need to let them know that's been done.

But I don't think they'll be so thrilled to hear about the snake. Because if he's slithered off anywhere, he's highly likely to have gone into their yard...

1 comment:

Sarah said...

Eeek! I'm finding that's one of the constant dangers of living on a farm. I've seen a few dugites slither out onto the gravel roads here, but I'm yet to find one in my garden (and I hope I don't!).